BARBERSHOP: THE ART OF QUEER FAILURE
Ace Lehner: BARBERSHOP: THE ART OF QUEER FAILURE
June 2 - June 25, 2023
Practice Gallery
Opening Reception: First Friday, June 2, 6:00 - 10:00 pm
Practice Gallery is pleased to present Barbershop: The Art of Queer Failure by artist Ace Lehner. A multimedia installation and performance work, Lehner’s Barbershop is a multimedia installation and performance work that engages queerness, failure, and masculinity masquerading as haircuts, all in a space modeled on the iconic barbershop. About this work, Lehner writes,
Failure has been part of queerness since the terms' reclamation in the 1980s. Queerness as identity and method fails to perform in ways that mainstream culture encourages. Queers fail to perform normatively when it comes to romantic partners, sexualities, gender identities, family structures, aesthetics, world making, and much more. Queer and queerness fail on purpose to be normative and instead throw norms, essentialism, and givens into question. Queers and queerness fail on purpose as a means of creating other possibilities.
Barbershop: The Art of Queer Failure, is an installation and social practice performance piece that applies scholar Jack Halberstam's concept of queer failure to the form of the barbershop. On the surface, the design and function of the site-responsive work mimics a heteropatriarchal, cis-normative barbershop. However, it proposes aesthetics not associated with barbershop masculinity, nor is the project’s means of exchange built around the perpetuation of capitalistic modes of interaction. Failure here becomes a productive way of proposing alternatives. Barbershop: The Art of Queer Failure, forwards queer failure as a means of playfully intervening in a cultural location wherein typically heteropatriarchal, binary cisgender norms are produced and perpetuated, de-essentializing gender via a playful utopian space of porous, ephemeral queer/trans community. The impetus for the project came out of the artist's dismay that there are diminishing number of places for LGBTQIA+ people to congregate and that historically, many queer spaces were bars, prohibitive to those who are averse to alcohol and those not of age.
Halberstam reframes dominant conceptions of failure itself and observes how in failing to succeed in the expected normative ways, queers engage in a praxis of creating alternatives. Embracing the ethos of queer failure as a productive way of proposing alternatives rather than adhering to cultural norms and ideological traditions of success, the installation and social practice piece takes the barbershop motif and queers it, creating a space for queer worlding. Glitter curtains mark the entrance; the walls are adorned with juxtapositions of loud patterned textiles, images of queer icons, pompoms, metal foil, and much more. A playful mix of various queer musical outfits punctuates the air, while party lights, a disco ball, and a faux zebra rug adorn the space to create an ambiance akin to a queer club coupled with a campy parlor. The project intentionally fails to replicate norms regarding who participates and even the barbers' abilities. Lehner is not a trained barber, but has given themself and their friends haircuts for over a decade.
Barbershops are notoriously great venues for all types of conversations, while the queer aesthetics and ethos of the installation facilitate celebrating queerness and gender nonconformity. The project creates space to ask questions about essentialist beliefs about binary gender, building community and facilitating discourse around LGBTQ+ experiences that extend into the broader world. In exchange for what the artist dubs a “queer failure” haircut (failing because it fails to be successful owing to the artist’s amateurish abilities and because there is a certain aesthetic of queer haircuts being anti-successful, and because the exchange is not monetary), participants agree to engage in an act of queer world making before their haircut grows out.
Artist's Bio
Dr. Ace Lehner is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist specializing in critical engagement with identity and representation, modern and contemporary art history and visual culture, new media, photography history and theory, trans and queer history and theory, critical race studies, and performance. Lehner's artistic practice primarily utilizes new media and social practice to mine the complex relation between representations and the constitution of identities. Lehner’s current book project is entitled Trans Representations: Decolonizing Visual Theory in New Media (working title).
Lehner's writing on art and visual culture has appeared in Art Journal, Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change, Cultural Politics, REFRACT, and The Journal on Images and Culture. Lehner's scholarship has also appeared in numerous anthologies, including a forthcoming chapter co-authored with Amelia Jones in Jones's Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (Wiley Blackwell, 2023). Lehner recently guest edited the first-ever issue of Art Journal dedicated to trans visual culture. And is currently, guest editing (with Chelsea Thompto) Trans New Media Art as Embodied Practice, a special issue of Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus. In September 2022, Lehner presented their research on trans selfies at the MeCCSA conference in Aberdeen, Scotland, and was keynote speaker at the International Visual Sociology Conference. In March of 2023, Lehner will present their research on trans photography at the Society for Photographic Education conference in Denver, CO.
Lehner's artwork has appeared at the International Center of Photography, New York, NY; Geary Contemporary, Millerton, NY; el Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; Gallery La Central, Montreal, Canada; SOMArts, San Francisco, CA; and The Wassaic Project in Wassaic NY.. Lehner holds a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MFA in Fine Art / MA in Visual Studies from California College of the Arts.